Visual search test online: can you find the M?
Find out how fast and how accurately your eyes pick one letter out of a crowd of look-alikes, the kind of looking you do when you scan a busy street, a page of text or a crowded shelf.
Scored part: 1 minute at most · tutorial and practice included · nothing to install
Is there an M among these letters?
Learn and practice
A short tutorial and 4 practice rounds that count for nothing.
20 scored rounds
Look-alike and distinct letters, mixed, with no feedback in between.
Your results
Speed, accuracy and steadiness, set against reference ranges.
What is the Find the M among N and O test?
It is a short letter search task, a kind of visual search test you can take online: a letter M sits among N or O letters, and you answer with one of two on-screen buttons, quickly and accurately. It records your reaction time, your accuracy and how steady your pace is, separately for look-alike and distinct letters. It is a new CogniFit design, not a copy of a classic study.
Find the M. Ignore every N and O.
That's the whole rule. What changes from round to round is how much the other letters look like the one you want.
Is there an M among these letters?
- The target
- The letter M, outlined here so you can see it. In the test, nothing marks it.
- The letters to ignore
- N letters. They share the M's straight strokes, so the M blends in.
- Your answer
- Two buttons on screen: click with a mouse or tap with a finger.
- The clock
- Each scored round allows up to 3 seconds to answer.
Is there an M among these letters?
- The target
- The same M, outlined here only to show where it is.
- The letters to ignore
- O letters. Round shapes that look nothing like an M, so it stands out.
- Your answer
- The same two buttons, the same way to answer.
- Why both kinds
- Comparing the two shows how much a look-alike slows you down.
One scored round, step by step
The letters appear
Look for the M among the N or O letters on a plain background.
You choose
Pick one of the two buttons before the time runs out.
The next round starts
No right-or-wrong signal: the next set of letters simply appears.
Look-alike and distinct rounds are shuffled together, half of each, rather than run in blocks, so tiredness doesn't tilt the comparison between them.1 The letters and their order are drawn fresh every time, so a second attempt never repeats the first.
The tutorial and 4 practice rounds come first, and you can repeat the tutorial as often as you like.
What a letter search asks of your attention
Finding one letter sounds trivial. Doing it quickly, again and again, while look-alikes crowd the screen, draws on several abilities at once.
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Visual search
Scanning a scene to find one particular item.
Spotting your suitcase on a crowded baggage carousel.
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Selective attention
Staying on the target while the letters around it are there to be ignored.
Finding your name on a long sign-up sheet.
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Visual discrimination
Telling apart shapes that look alike, such as M and N.
Reading a license plate where an 8 could be a B.
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Processing speed and steadiness
How quickly you see and answer, and how even your pace stays.
Checking item after item on a grocery receipt.
These are the abilities a letter search calls on. How closely this version's scores track each of them has not been measured yet; the science section below says what that means.
Curious how your own eyes handle the look-alikes?
Reading your results: speed, accuracy, steadiness
When you finish, the task shows your results on screen, set against reference ranges. Four readings are worth looking at first.
- Median reaction time Lower is quicker
- Your typical answering time: half your answers were faster, half slower. Unlike the average, one very slow answer doesn't move it.
- Accuracy Higher is better
- Out of every hundred answers you gave, how many were right. Remember you get no feedback during the scored rounds, so this is the first time you'll see it.
- Steadiness Lower is steadier
- Called the coefficient of variation: how irregular your rhythm was compared with your overall speed. It lets a fast and a slow person be compared on steadiness alone.
The look-alike comparison
This is the reading that makes the task its own. Every result is given for the look-alike rounds and for the distinct rounds separately, so you can set your median time on one beside your median on the other. The difference is the extra time it took you to find an M hiding among N letters rather than O letters.
Do the same with accuracy: did the look-alikes cost you speed, correct answers, or both?
Times are shown in thousandths of a second (milliseconds). Your results also list your mean time, your number of errors and the spread of your times; each reads the same way, lower is better. They describe this session, not you: a comparison with reference ranges, not a clinical assessment.
Every reading above is waiting for your own figures.
The science: a new task, read honestly
A visual search task asks you to find one item among others that are there to be ignored. Many online tests reuse a classic experiment; this one was built from scratch, and says so.
The kind of task it belongs to is a classic one. Treisman and Gelade (1980) gave the classic description of visual search, in which a target has to be found among distractors.2
Research has used visual search for decades to study how attention is guided: Wolfe (1998) looked at what a very large body of search trials can tell us about the process,3 and Wolfe and Horowitz (2017) reviewed the factors that guide attention during a search.4
Those studies describe groups, and they also mark the limits for individuals: Hommel, Li and Li (2004) showed that visual search changes across the life span, one reason a single score says little about any one person.5
This version, Find the M among N and O, is a new CogniFit design, and no published studies are recorded for it. It was designed from the objective its author wrote down. Every round, every timing and every measure is declared once and run from that declaration, so what you see on screen and what the data records are the same thing by design.
The flip side is just as clear. Its own validation, how it behaves across many people and what a given score means for a given person, needs data that has not been collected yet.
What it can tell you today
- How fast, how accurately and how steadily you answered in this session.
- How much look-alike letters slowed you compared with distinct ones.
- How you compare with yourself on another day, since the sequence is new each time.
What it cannot tell you yet
- What your score means about you as a person, or about your health.
- A diagnosis of any kind: reference ranges describe groups, not any one individual.
- Whether it predicts how you'll do at driving, work or study.
How the task is built, in more detail
- Each round is made of the item to respond to, the items to ignore, the two answer buttons and a plain background.
- The two kinds of round, high and low similarity between the M and the letters around it, each make up half of the scored rounds and are spread through the task.1
- The spread of your times is computed on correct answers only, because the timing of an error comes from a different process.
- The coefficient of variation divides that spread by your mean time, so it does not grow or shrink with how fast you are.
- Each session also runs quality checks, such as answers too fast to be real and how many rounds were usable, to decide whether the session can be read at all. They describe the session, not the person.
- Repeating the tutorial before you start does not affect any result.
Take it knowing exactly what it can and can't say.
Questions before you start
How long does the visual search test take?
There is a short tutorial and 4 practice rounds first, then 20 scored rounds of up to 3 seconds each, so the scored part lasts a minute at most. The tutorial and practice are not counted in that time, and you can repeat the tutorial as often as you like before starting.
Do I need an account to take it?
No. You can take the test and see your results at the end without signing up. An account is only useful if you want to keep your results and follow them over time.
Can I take it on my phone?
Yes. It runs on a computer, a tablet or a phone, and you answer with a mouse click or a tap of your finger.
Why doesn't it tell me if I got a round right?
During the scored rounds the next set of letters simply appears, with no right-or-wrong signal. You see how you did when the test ends.
Can I take it again?
Yes. The letters and their order are drawn fresh every time, so you won't meet the same sequence twice.
Is this a medical or clinical test?
No. It is a cognitive testing task for curiosity and self-comparison. Your result is set against reference ranges; it is not a diagnosis or a clinical assessment.
Now you know what it measures. Ready to find the M?
Run through the tutorial, take the 20 rounds and see how the look-alikes treated you.
More attention tasks in the series: Colours and Words (Stroop) and Respond to the Middle Arrow (Flanker).
Sources
- CogniFit. Letter Search: M among N and O. Task design, conditions and reported measures. CogniFit.
- Treisman, A. M., Gelade, G. (1980). A feature-integration theory of attention. Cognitive Psychology, 12(1), 97-136. https://doi.org/10.1016/0010-0285(80)90005-5
- Wolfe, J. M. (1998). What can 1 million trials tell us about visual search?. Psychological Science, 9(1), 33-39. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9280.00006
- Wolfe, J. M., Horowitz, T. S. (2017). Five factors that guide attention in visual search. Nature Human Behaviour, 1, 0058. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-017-0058
- Hommel, B., Li, K. Z. H., Li, S.-C. (2004). Visual search across the life span. Developmental Psychology, 40(4), 545-558. https://doi.org/10.1037/0012-1649.40.4.545
This test is for information and self-comparison only. It is not medical advice, does not provide a diagnosis and does not replace care from a qualified professional.
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